Saturday, April 27, 2013

The Plover Project -- Life in the Boat Yard (Part 7)

I haven't posted much lately mostly because it seems like I don't have much to say about our progress on the boat. For example, today I sanded. Yesterday I sanded. I sanded the day before that, too, and I will be sanding tomorrow.

We did take care of some things that we had been putting off. We built a storage shed that fits on top of our flatbed trailer, cleaned out our storage unit, stored all that crap in the storage shed, and then guess what we did? We worked on the boat, e.g., sanded.

We spent 2 weeks at the local crack hotel so that I could completely paint and varnish the interior of the boat without messing up our nice cushions and everything else we own. I was able to set up a varnishing station in the kitchen area of our room and started each day by putting another coat of varnish on a few pieces I brought over. At least the smell of varnish masked the heavy cigarette smoke aroma that permeated the entire room. The hotel was surprisingly quiet (we expected crack head brawls about midnight every night), free of roaches (except for the extremely large one that resided in the bathroom and flew through the air, landing on Chris and traveling down his arm one night), and had a seemingly unlimited supply of hot water (although Chris enjoyed turning on the kitchen faucet while I was in the shower, causing me to get scorched and then frozen). Shower or no shower, launched or not, I missed living on the boat and was happy to move back aboard.

Aside from sanding, varnishing, and painting, I have learned a new skill. I put threads on all the bronze rod that Chris had cut into 3 inch lengths for attaching our chainplates to the hull. It was interesting to do, I had to be very careful to make the thread straight, and I only chopped off a small section of the tip of my index finger on my left hand.

Guess what I'm doing?

What do you think? Good idea?

First coat goes on.

View from the bow:

View from the ground. That's our neighbor's boat in the background.

That's John Goodman standing on the stern, helping Chris. I don't know what we would have done without his help.